Pomegranite Grenade
by Kill Natalie
Summary: A kiss, a line, a touch, a pill. Johnlock.


Hand full of pills, potent, rose-colored, Neuron Implosion, Pomegranate Grenade. Palm full of rose-colored pills he pokes them with his finger; eenie-meenie-miney-moe he caught excitement by the toe. His veins pulsed and his entire core was set to vibrate as if his insides, the jail cell of his ribs, was shaken by an earthquake, an electrical storm, 8.9 on the Richter Scale _Oh, Jesus Christ._ He passes out and throws up tea and bread next to the fireplace, wiping his vomit-covered hand through that mass of curly hair and he's so high, Jesus Christ he's so high, that he doesn't care until he's woken up forever and a day later still so tired, still so fucking inconsolably bored.

Sherlock knew John even before he knew him- knew him with a glance, knew his past and his present and his soul by the dust on his shoes and the curl of his fingers. He knew with a bat of his lashes that neither smoke nor pill nor paper had ever passed the barriers of John's teeth, and he knew that John's brain had never swam in its own swirling unconsciousness, it's primordial soup of hormones. So when Sherlock was rolling one of his bright red pills in the paper of a ten pound note and crushing it into a galaxy of powder constellations beneath the handle of his pistol he did it in the warm solitude of his own room. Rolling the bill into a paper tube he lowered his face and inhaled Andromeda, snorted stars. He drowned his boredom in a million little universes.

The sun birthed itself from the horizon like a clawed monster pulling itself up and out of a massive crevice in the earth, and there was Sherlock, awake and alert for three revolutions of the burning sphere, playing the violin until the instrument screamed and his muscles creaked with pain. Through the wall John yelled for him to stop, it's early, Sherlock please, but if the voice crawled into the cavern of his ear it became lost and died there. He tilted the bow on the instrument's strings back and forth back and forth, rocking like a paper boat on the dancing black sea until the violin grew a tongue and the notes seemed to echo something inside him, _my head hurts, my heart it hurts._

The sun sets. His palm is sweating hard and the pink outer coating of the pills bleeds into the creases on his hand, filling them like a bloody river. _Eenie-meenie-miney-moe_ he pops one into his mouth at random. Nuclear fission.

John flinched himself into awareness as if he'd been stuck with a pin.

"God dammit…Sherlock, what? What do you _want?_" John groped blindly in the dark for his alarm clock. His hand flopped onto the black box like a suffocating fish and he turned it towards him. The electronic letters, red as strawberries, read half past two. John didn't know whether to scream or cry.

"Your shoulder hurts." Sherlock's presence was like a plank of wood behind John's back. He could feel the other there with the tendrils of his nerves, untouching, unmoving, almost surreal in his stillness.

John's face was in his pillow, his exasperated mouth open against the fabric. "It's half past two." He made a sound like a laugh. "I finally fell asleep and you woke me up at two thirty."

"Here," Sherlock said. He jabbed his middle and index fingers into the place between John's shoulder and neck and John made a quiet sound of pain. "It hurts you here, yes?" The muscle was a ball of tension beneath Sherlock's digit.

"Sher-"

"That's why you've had difficulty sleeping, yes?" Sherlock's cello voice was in overdrive, rumbling like an avalanche of giant rocks. It was like he'd been attached to a car battery and forced full of electricity.

John grabbed one of the pillows beneath his head and hugged it under his nose. "You're high," he sighed, breathing the smell of fabric softener into the winding cavities of his sinuses. His voice was the sing-song tone of delirium. "High as a kite." Sherlock pulled his fingers away as if ripping out a syringe. His inhale was as sharp as a paper cut. John expected a rush of words to stampede out from behind Sherlock's teeth, for the other to spill his thoughts from his mouth like a deluge of unfathomable intellect, but the rumbling voice rolled and slowed to a stop.

"Goodnight, John."

And John was coaxed into oblivion like a man pulled into the depths of the sea.

In the morning Sherlock's eyes are red, his mouth dry, his joints creaking and aching like fragile, fractured bones. He sips tea and wanders the corridors of his mind, brushing his fingers over the leather spines that occupy his palace library. He picks one up and tries to open it. The book stays closed, hardly a book at all, solid through and through. Tea scalds the entirety of his mouth and he doesn't feel it. Baby pink, the pill dissolves into bitter bubbles on his tongue. He licks the color off of his palm.

Eenie-meeney-miney-moe he caught his rapture by the throat. His hand curled around the arm of his chair, grasping at the leather with the tips of his fingers like a man desperately pulling himself from the edge of a cliff, his body loose and languid, his bathrobe open. To Sherlock, riding The Nod was like losing his footing at the very zenith of a rolling hill, tripping over that final mountainous arch. He saw for miles, the horizon invisible behind an army of trees, the sky aflame with the setting sun and the loving breath of the wind cool and welcoming against his hot, sweating face, and then his heels were kicking at the air and his hair was catching the rays of sunlight and he was earthbound, he was, he was, he was.

Sherlock lived for The Nod and would surely die for it and its monochrome rainbow of half-consciousness, but not today. He pulled himself back up the hill of awareness with a tiny mound of snow white on the end of his finger. He was sure John could hear them, those congested snorts, the sniffling and swallowing aftermath of slimy post-nasal drip and head rush, but if he did he kept this knowledge crumpled and folded in the impermeable blackness of his skull.

"John."

The voice came like an arrow and struck John in the back of the head. "Hmm, what?"

"Your shoulder is hurting." Sherlock's voice was a babbling stream, so close to being unnaturally steady, soft. He added, "And you have a headache."

"Yes," he said, "and you need a hobby. Something quiet, something that doesn't involve me." Facedown, John pulled a pillow over his head.

The finger was on his shoulder again, struck into the tightly wound muscle like a stick thrust into dirt only to stand on its own. Sherlock was a child in his vicious curiosity; touching, prodding, asking, the shell of his skull pregnant with innumerable questions and wonderful, terrifying answers. John rolled his shoulder and turned, almost spun, in the bed. He had expected that he and Sherlock would be nose to nose, invading each other's personal spheres of electricity, but when his eyes met the others, flickering and illuminated by the sliver of moonlight that shone its silver face through a crack in the curtains, a small wasteland of sheets separated them. Sherlock's eyes were large, curious; his dark brows lowered and intense. His hair was a charred grassland.

"You haven't been over exerting yourself," Sherlock observed.

"No, I haven't."

"You aren't predisposed to muscle aches or headaches."

"I guess not. I don't know."

Sherlock exhaled through his nose. "So why are you hurting?"

John made an exasperated gesture with his hand. "Why does it matter? People hurt. People feel pain."

"Not for no reason." The fingers, white as bleached bone, white as the branches of the sky-reaching birch, touched the edges of Sherlock's still, too still, lips, his eyes trembling in the light of the moon's glow like water beneath the surface of a frozen lake. His robe was white, his hair inky black, his body almost skeletal in its thinness so that Sherlock's entire being was a winter landscape, snowy fields. John could feel Sherlock picking at him, looking him over and knowing him, knowing him with an intuition and intelligence that stripped him bare. As if to break Sherlock's invading gaze, John said through a sigh,

"Sometimes things hurt for no reason."

Sherlock blinked stiffly. "Not for you."

At some point John drifted into sleep and Sherlock's voice dissolved into the quiet humming of his unconscious. The next morning he awoke to the sound of Sherlock retching and vomiting into the toilet and he thought vaguely to himself that he felt sick like that, too.

They sat in silence at the breakfast table, Sherlock's hands shaking too hard to pick up his toast, John rolling his the stiffness from his shoulder and gritting his teeth through the hot bubbling in his stomach. Sherlock gave up on eating and tried to read the paper. He twitched and ripped it down the middle. John left to take something for his head.

When night was a dark sheet that blanketed the sky, John lay in his bed, awake. The door creaked open and the bed shifted. He could feel it then, the firm press of Sherlock's mouth against his back, the hook of his curling fingers on his shoulder, and he felt the cocaine buzz, the opium forest fire, the catch in his throat like a pill swallowed with spit. He felt the autumn breeze of Sherlock's breath, exhaled from his nose, on the naked crook of his neck. John's hand was in Sherlock's hair, the mouth held still and tight through his pajama shirt.

"Don't," he said. John's voice was almost inaudible.

"Why?"

John swallowed. His mouth was dry. "You're an addict."

Sherlock answered, his voice almost lost in the fabric of John's shirt, "So are you."

The hand was still in Sherlock's hair, the fingers twisting and turning there. "I know," he said. The hand on his shoulder felt as light as a dried leaf. John cleared his throat and asked, "So, what now? What's hurting me now?"

The pressure moved from the place on his back. John felt the touch of Sherlock's nose, the line it traced, as he unhooked his fingers from Sherlock's tangle of hair and the mouth touched that naked corner of skin of his neck, brushed it as soft as a newborn's breath. Something welled up inside John, swelled and swallowed his pain until the aches and the suffering were overwhelmed, disappeared. Burning electrical fire, a roaring tsunami, a screaming wind that devoured him, killed him, then forced him back to life again. A kiss, a line, a touch, a pill. Eenie-meenie-miney-moe. The mouth parted against his skin.

"Goodnight, John."


End file.
